Work and Pensions Committee
Oral evidence: Safeguarding and culture at DWP, HC 283
Wednesday 2 September 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 2 September 2026.
Members present: Debbie Abrahams (Chair); Rushanara Ali; Lee Barron; Steve Darling; Damien Egan; John Milne; Liz Twist.
Questions 29 - 99
Witnesses
I: Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms MP, Minister of State in the Department for Work and Pensions and Minister of State (Minister for Equalities) in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government; Dr Gail Allsopp, Chief Medical Adviser, Department for Work and Pensions; Clare Talbot, Deputy Director Support to Engage, Guidance and Appeal, Department for Work and Pensions; and Neil Couling CB CBE, Director General, DWP Services and Fraud, Department for Work and Pensions.
Witnesses: Rt Hon Sir Stephen Timms MP, Dr Gail Allsopp, Clare Talbot and Neil Couling CB CBE.
Q29 Chair: A very warm welcome to the Work and Pensions Committee’s inquiry to review safeguarding one year on. We are joined today for this session by Sir Stephen Timms, who is the Minister for Social Security and—you have quite a long title here, Stephen—Minister of State, Minister for Equalities, in the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. A very warm welcome. Lovely to see you as always.
You are joined by Dr Gail Allsopp, who is the Chief Medical Adviser for the DWP, and Clare Talbot. A very warm welcome, Clare. This is your first session with us, so welcome to you. You are Deputy Director Support to Engage. Then finally, Neil Couling, who is Director General of Services and Fraud in the DWP. You have been a guest many, many times over the years, Neil. A warm welcome to you as well.
Neil Couling: Fifty, we reckon.
Chair: How many?
Neil Couling: Fifty.
Chair: Fifty sessions. Oh my goodness, I think you have been here more than I have.
Neil Couling: It includes the Public Accounts Committee. I cannot blame the Work and Pensions Committee for 50 times.
Q30 Chair: Yes; I have attended one of those as well. Thank you again for joining us. All levity aside, this is a very important theme and it is something that the members of the Committee have taken very seriously. This is why we wanted to review this particular report, which we presented last May, just to see what progress there has been, and to remind us that this was driven by the levels of deaths of claimants and our real concern given, for example, the prevention of future deaths notices from coroners as well.
I will start with a nice open one for you, Stephen. Tell us what you feel the progress has been over the last 10 years.
Sir Stephen Timms: Thank you very much for inviting us.
Chair: Did I say 10 years? Over the last year.
Sir Stephen Timms: Right, indeed.
Chair: Over the last 10 years, not so much. I am hoping that it is better.
Sir Stephen Timms: I will concentrate on the last year, yes. Thank you very much for inviting us back. The Committee’s report on this was a very important report that has had a big impact on the Department. We worked in the past year on a big change in the culture of the Department towards a more personalised and more supportive approach.
We have improved our approach to safeguarding, as that is defined in legislation, and also our approach to supporting vulnerable people dealing with the benefit system more broadly. We have rolled out safeguarding training widely across the Department. We are tracking now all safeguarding referrals raised in health benefit assessments, which we did not used to do. We are developing mental health training to help staff do a better job in supporting the vulnerable people they are dealing with, and 6,500 staff have gone through trauma-informed training, which is now part of the induction for staff working in the Jobs and Careers Service. We have started publishing learning from internal process reviews.
Those are all important changes. We will assess the progress that we have made at the end of this year. We have a five-year plan. There is certainly more to do and I am keen to hear from the Committee what you think the priorities should be.
Q31 Chair: Thank you. You may have seen or had a briefing from the June session, the first oral evidence session in this review inquiry. We had members from NAWRA, as well as the joint convener of the National Network of Adult Safeguarding Boards. I think they were quite fair and said that there were some positive things that we needed to acknowledge. Particularly Dr Allsopp, your role was seen as a plus—that there was an MOU with safeguarding boards. They thought that was all very positive, but it was also said that they were unsure if momentum had been maintained.
There is a sense that the Department’s pace had slowed down, perhaps because of the enormity of the task of embedding improved safeguarding practices across the DWP, particularly the conflict between safeguarding individuals and other drivers—for example, getting people into work and still having quite a strong focus on sanctions. There was an acknowledgement of that, and if you have not had details of that session, I urge you to please get that.
Sir Stephen Timms: I have had a look at it, and I welcome the acknowledgment, as you say, of the progress that has been made, but I also agree—as witnesses in that session pointed out—that there is more to do. I do not think the momentum has slackened off, certainly from my perspective, but there is undoubtedly a great deal more to do.
Q32 Chair: You mentioned in your remarks at the start, Stephen, that there has been a change in culture. That was something that they picked up and queried whether that is actually the case. They mentioned particularly the advanced customer support senior leaders and how there is a difficulty, when they are trying to make changes, in how that is responded to. I do not know if that has been picked up.
Sir Stephen Timms: The ACSSLs have a very important role in the Department, and they have been doing a lot. I made the point that in this last year we have started on a big programme of culture change. I am not claiming that that has been completed, but that change is under way and the role of the ACSSLs is a very important one. For example, they have maintained relationships with about 1,200 external organisations. They have received 6,500 referrals from external organisations over the period 2025-26. I have not had feedback from them that they are finding it is getting harder. I certainly have not picked that up. If the Committee has picked that up, I would be interested to know about it. They have an important role, they are doing an important job, and I think they are doing it well.
Q33 Chair: One of the things that was picked up by the witnesses in the first session was that it is still not possible for welfare rights advisers and others to have a direct line to ACSSLs, describing it as a bit of a gatekeeping issue. I don’t know if you want to comment on that.
Sir Stephen Timms: The whole Department needs to engage properly with welfare rights advisers and benefit advisers. I don’t think it is just a job for ACSSLs. If people in the Department have an approach from a welfare rights organisation and they need some help, they can certainly go to an ACSSL for that help. I don’t think it would be the role of ACSSLs to be accessible to every welfare rights organisation. They have a support role and it is a very important one.
Q34 Chair: Let’s get back to something that was one of the core recommendations about how the whole Department changes how it works, with a system-based approach and safeguarding integrated into all that we do at all levels from the top right through. Dr Allsopp, that was one of the things that was picked up as a positive, but how does that work in practice? For example, when the Secretary of State was with us in June he mentioned that you do no specific reports. It is more a question of an ad hoc feeding in of your concerns about a particular policy. Is that the best way to go about identifying particular risks associated with a policy as it is being developed and goes through the implementation process?
Dr Allsopp: We have done a lot of work in this space. My team has grown quite substantially over the last few years. We now have 60 in my clinical team who work in the clinical policy area. You are absolutely right: there is no specific one report that I write unless that is on something like clinical governance, which is in my domain.
What we have managed to do is work across the whole of our policy colleagues and across the Department to look at culture change, as the Minister was talking about. We have done a point scale effectively, looking at how confident people were when we first went in a year ago about engaging the clinical team and asking for advice. If you are looking at a point of 10, it was around 3.5. We have done lots of culture change and that has now gone up to a score of over 7.5, which is something like a 115% increase in the confidence in engaging with us.
We have found that people are engaging with us much earlier in the process, and if for some reason people do not engage with us, I also have access to the ministerial inboxes. That means that any piece of advice that is going up to Ministers or the Secretary of State, I get to see anyway, and I read every single piece of advice. If we don’t think the clinical team has had input when it should do, we contact the team or we speak with the Ministers to make sure that that advice is taken on board. I really do think things have changed quite substantially over the last year.
Q35 Chair: Can I ask about two examples that we have? We know, Stephen, that you are co-chair of the co-produced Timms review. What engagement has Gail had with proposals that you may be putting forward for that?
Sir Stephen Timms: Gail and her team have had a big role in that review. I will ask Gail to say a little bit more about that.
Dr Allsopp: I have a member of my team embedded in the Timms review. There is a clinician who is fully embedded within the team and is actually part of the Timms review team. She has been educating and supporting the panel, but she is also involved in the policymaking. That is escalated out to other members of the team, depending on what the ask of the Timms review is, so fully embedded.
Q36 Chair: That is very constructive. Another area of policy that is imminently to report is the Milburn review. What engagement has Gail’s team had on that?
Dr Allsopp: Again, we have a member of my team who is associated with the Milburn review, although not embedded in because the Milburn review is an independent review. Obviously, that needs to be independent, and it is really important that independence stands there. We are working with not only NHS England and Department of Health colleagues who are interacting with the Milburn review; we are also regularly in the update meetings and making sure that we are there, we are listening and we are feeding in when appropriate.
Q37 Chair: That is very constructive as well. This is your last session here. Do you feel reassured that if there was, for example, another policy announcement—such as a change in winter fuel payments or whatever—your team would be directly involved in that? If I remember correctly, they weren’t when that last happened.
Dr Allsopp: I think it is much more likely we will be involved. Can I say 100%? I cannot say 100% at the beginning of the development, but I think because we have that backstop of me reviewing everything that is sent up to Ministers, as long as those submissions go via the ministerial inbox, there is a way to catch it—the safe approach that we are doing—which means that we can now become involved, even if it is at a late stage.
Q38 Chair: That is very helpful. Thank you so much. My last question to you, Gail, is about the work with coroners. One of our recommendations was for the Department to work with coroners to have a better understanding about the deaths that are not being reported. John Milne will be coming on to the IPR process and the deaths of claimants that get reported annually, but we all know that that is really the tip of the iceberg. Our recommendation around coroners was to try to ensure that we could have a more reliable dataset that would enable the Department to know the seriousness of that. What work have you done with coroners to try to get that understanding?
Dr Allsopp: There is a shared approach by Clare and me, so Clare now takes over and leads the coroners team and the inquest team. However, one of the things that we have done—I have always been very worried about silo working in the Department—because we work so very closely together, is bring together what we are calling a multidisciplinary team approach.
We have a triage process now. Therefore, anything that comes into the Department, whether it is related to a coroner or an inquest or whether it is an internal process review or a domestic violence death investigation, comes now through this multidisciplinary triage. That then looks at how we are tracking it, how we are monitoring, and how we can then feed the learning back. I think we are in a much better place, but are we there completely? Absolutely not. I think there is work to do, but it is in very safe hands with Clare.
Q39 Chair: Is there automatic reporting to the Department from coroners?
Clare Talbot: We track IPRs and the cases that we have and we know about. Obviously there are lots of cases of coroners that we will not be aware of, and we do not always know the cause of death. There is not an automatic reporting, but we have really strengthened our links with coroners. We have a much clearer central focal point. We have enhanced engagement and we are learning not just from inquests where there is a prevention of future deaths report, but from any learning points, and we look at our own internal learning as well.
Neil Couling: We track when the coroners ask us for information.
Clare Talbot: Yes.
Neil Couling: Sometimes we will be asked for information not because they think there is any DWP involvement, but because it helps build a picture of the life of the individual they are inquiring about.
Q40 Chair: Is there any reason not to ask for automatic reporting?
Dr Allsopp: It is really difficult, isn’t it? We deal with so many people in the Department. We deal with over 20 million people every single year, so the number of deaths that will happen in that population is high. Just because somebody is in touch with the Department does not mean there is any causality with their death, so actually the dataset would be quite tricky to understand.
Chair: I am not suggesting that. I did some work on this back in 2014, and we know that there is a higher rate of death for people on IB and ESA, for example, than for the population as a whole. It is not at all to suggest that there is a causality, but what I am asking is: what would be the negatives of automatic reporting for somebody who was on social security support, in whatever form, so that if they died it would be reported to the Department? At the moment it is a big gap, and we do not know the actual numbers. I will leave that with you. The next question I have—
Steve Darling: Debbie, do you mind if I just follow up on that?
Chair: Can I just finish my question, then I will bring you in?
Steve Darling: Okay.
Q41 Chair: The next question is on metrics. The metrics that we have so far are very much inputs focused on training with comms and so on. What are the proposals for a more comprehensive set of metrics that are outcome and output focused?
Dr Allsopp: I can talk about what we have done in the clinical world. I think what you have to remember is I came in 2023, so in the clinical space we are two or three years ahead of the operational side of the Department when we are looking at metrics. What we have tracked over the last 12 months, if you look from September until July, in the health assessment space where our 5,500 healthcare professionals are, is any time that an individual comes in with a vulnerability that shows that their health has deteriorated; I think that mental health is of particular interest to this Committee.
Since September last year, our healthcare professionals have moved onwards and referred onwards individuals who have had a deterioration in either their physical or mental health 57,000 times, and 37,000 of those times related to mental health issues. Now what does that mean? In some cases, that would mean calling an ambulance because actually the person is in a very severe state. In some cases, it would require picking up the phone to a GP surgery, talking to the GP surgery and arranging an appointment. In other cases, it would be writing a letter because the person is overusing their medication or something like that. That is a significant number of vulnerabilities, and particularly relates to mental health.
The other thing that we have done is we have tracked all of our safeguarding referrals. During those health assessments—and if we look to the end of June, which was in our clinical governance report this year—looking at 1.3 million assessments, there were about 1,500 times that healthcare professionals were really concerned about safeguarding, and I think it was 991 times that they ended up making a referral to the local authority for further investigation to make sure that the person was safe.
We now track and know that 50% of those relate to child safeguarding issues—so young carers or neglect—and 50% relate to adult safeguarding issues, which again very commonly is neglect but also physical harm, emotional abuse, financial abuse—lots of things when we are tracking those. We are much further ahead and the aim is to do a similar thing on the operational side, but we need to build the systems to be able to track those on the operational side.
Chair: I think it is fair to say that there is a bit of work to do on that and to make sure that we get good quality metrics to monitor progress. Steve.
Q42 Steve Darling: Thank you. Very briefly, I wanted to ask about the coroners reports. I review coroners reports to see if there are any failures in systems for constituents of mine. It isn’t that difficult. Isn’t it possible for AI to assist the Department in interrogating those reports to see where there might be any obvious flags, and then a human could actually see whether there are opportunities to learn from that?
Neil Couling: There is a lot of talk about AI and what it can and cannot do. I think some of the talk is in front of what AI can actually do at the moment, but it has that potential. We know that there are 36,000 coroners inquests in a year. We were asked for evidence last year on 12 of those. I don’t think there is a preponderance of DWP involvement, but we would certainly think about whether there are ways of gleaning the kind of information in the way that you suggest, Mr Darling.
Steve Darling: Thank you.
Chair: I think there is a bit more to do on that. I will hand over now to Rushanara Ali.
Q43 Rushanara Ali: Good morning. I want to start off with a constituency case, just to bring alive what we are talking about today. A constituent’s partner approached me because during the process of a universal credit application, the mental health state of the individual deteriorated to the point of suicide. I wrote to the Department on three occasions in August, the 10th, the 17th and the 20th, and had no substantive response. She was hospitalised. Then I wrote to you, Sir Stephen. I do not believe I received a substantive response.
I am raising this case because when there is system failure—as it seems in this case, which needs to be investigated—MPs will hear from desperate constituents about their family members and how they are very concerned about their state of health, which has been triggered by the assessment process and the handling and mismanagement of such processes when they go wrong. I would like something to be done to ensure that it does not require a Member of Parliament to write constantly in a critical case and then have to resort to going to the Minister’s office. I have checked, and I do not believe I have received a substantive response that some action has been triggered as a result, but appointments have been created and cancelled, which is adding insult to injury in this situation.
The problem is that these sorts of cases are still unfortunately widespread. I appreciate everything that is being done, but we cannot have this situation. Not everybody will go or know to go to their Member of Parliament, and even when Members of Parliament are contacting Ministers’ offices in critical circumstances, things can take time, which can be a matter of life and death. Can you tell us what action the Department is taking to deal with the interface between MPs and constituents, so that we can be assured that there are people in place in the Department who are able to spot these very critical cases that could become very serious—or are already serious—and that could be a matter of life and death so they are actioned quickly?
Sir Stephen Timms: First of all, I apologise that you have not had a response to those letters. They were all written in August, were they?
Rushanara Ali: Yes, to the Department for Work and Pensions.
Sir Stephen Timms: On the letters to me, there was a serious problem over the course of the last year and replies to MPs’ letters were taking far too long. I am very pleased that has largely now been overcome, and I am able to reply much more quickly to the letters I receive. I think as of this morning there are 17 replies to MPs waiting for my attention. I will go through every single one of them before that reply is sent out in my name, and I will certainly have a look at what has happened to your letter and where that has got to. I very much hope that problems—obviously, I do not know the details of this case; I do not know whether you want to tell us a bit more about what happened.
Q44 Rushanara Ali: I will not go into the specifics because it is a confidential matter, but I wanted to highlight it as a general concern. We need confidence. We do not expect you to have to deal with it, but your officials need to get on to it fast and respond to us so that we can support our constituents, because it is very desperate in these sorts of situations.
Sir Stephen Timms: It is very much my aim that the process that we are talking about this morning will significantly improve the experience of people like the constituent you refer to. At the end of this year we will review what progress we have made over the past year and, as I say, we have a five-year plan here, so we are at the start of a process.
Q45 Rushanara Ali: Can I take you to a broader question about sanctions? In this case I have been told that the sanctions, and the fear of sanctions, has worsened the individual’s mental state to the point of a suicide attempt. What can you say—and perhaps you can come in as well, Dr Allsopp—about what has been done for those who are vulnerable? We will come on to vulnerability, the definitions and safeguarding where the sanction system actually makes matters worse. At the moment, cases like this show that the “do no harm” position is not being followed.
Sir Stephen Timms: The Department recognises that taking a one-size-fits-all approach to people coming into the Department is not the right approach. Therefore, our aim is to tailor the requirements that are made of people to their individual circumstances, supporting people to engage with the Department, making sure that safeguards are in place for those who are vulnerable or have additional support needs.
By the sound of what you are saying, sanctions have not been imposed in this case but there was a worry about sanctions. Is that right? Where sanctions are considered—and sometimes they have to be, as I think the Committee will recognise—there are multiple checks before a sanction is imposed as independent decision making. We are looking at testing more personalised approaches still for the future. I am hoping that that will overcome the problem that you are describing, but I do accept that inevitably there are sanctions in the system and sometimes those sanctions will be imposed on people who are vulnerable. The Department has to do that with great care and that is what we are aiming to do.
Q46 Rushanara Ali: Yes. I suppose in this case—and there will be other cases like that where mental health issues are at play, which is leading to suicide attempts—we need confidence that the individual personalised assessments take into account the vulnerability ahead of any sanctions being considered, or even likely, because otherwise we will see that the actions of the Jobcentre Plus administrators or officials are actually doing harm, which clearly the state should not be doing and is not what any of us want. Can you give us confidence that that is the direction of travel?
Sir Stephen Timms: I am just going to make the point that is definitely the direction of travel—
Rushanara Ali: What is the plan so we are in a position where I do not have to raise cases like this?
Dr Allsopp: One of the things that we are looking at, in response to the Committee’s report, as well as focusing very much on safeguarding, is much wider mental health support particularly. One of the things that the Department has put into place, following bringing lots and lots of people together—I chaired a meeting with lots of people across the Department to look at how we could address this—is our “support to engage” approach.
That is an umbrella term that will encompass not only the safeguarding, which is built into statutory law, but our reasonable adjustment approach and our vulnerability approach—so exactly what you are talking about—to make sure that we have a single person, and that is Clare and Clare’s team We have a director general who is here with us today, Neil Couling, who is responsible for this work and will oversee that process. There is a lot of activity in jobcentres already that puts that support in place. There is a lot of training in place already for work coaches.
Q47 Rushanara Ali: I would like to come on to that. Can anyone tell us when we can expect to see the DWP safeguarding policy framework, which was promised by the end of year one in the Secretary of State’s written statement on safeguarding?
Sir Stephen Timms: By the end of the year, as we have committed.
Rushanara Ali: We can expect that?
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes.
Q48 Rushanara Ali: Has the Department committed any funding, Sir Stephen, to improve its approach to safeguarding?
Sir Stephen Timms: There is a big programme here and, yes, there is definitely funding behind it. I don’t know whether Gail or Clare might want to say some more.
Dr Allsopp: In the spending review, we have to apply for funding, as you know, and we did apply for money within the spending review, which we were given and we are very grateful to have been given. That has been transferred now from my team to Clare’s team, who will be taking the leadership.
Q49 Rushanara Ali: Can you share a number of what that is for safeguarding?
Dr Allsopp: I don’t remember the exact amount. We can get that.
Rushanara Ali: You will get back to us?
Dr Allsopp: We can, yes.
Q50 Rushanara Ali: We recommended that the DWP develops an additional support toolkit—you mentioned some of the work you are doing, which is great—so that it is easier for claimants and support organisations to navigate the system. The Chair has already picked up on the support organisations. We have National Advice Week coming up. We know the amount of work they do, which supports us as Members of Parliament when we are having to support our constituents. The navigation part is really important, including for us. The Government said that they would consider this recommendation after they outlined their approach to safeguarding. What consideration has been made of this and is it forthcoming?
Sir Stephen Timms: We will be setting out in the safeguarding policy framework—as I have said, that will be at the end of the year—our approach, our principles and our responsibilities in what I hope will be a clear and accessible way. I do not think a toolkit will be needed as well. I think the framework itself will do the job. That is certainly our hope, but the Committee will be able to make up its mind about that when it sees it at the end of the year.
Q51 Rushanara Ali: I suppose the concern is that if you have people in Jobcentre Pluses around the country and training is not mandatory, just encouraged, is there something to be said about making it more tangible or specific? Frameworks are helpful but on the how-to, is there something to be said for providing more support and clarity for those who are at the frontline doing difficult jobs? They are the ones who are having to make challenging decisions and find a balance between the different expectations of them on the frontline in the jobcentres and so on.
Neil Couling: Coming on to training, because it is possible to get lost a bit in the labelling here, safeguarding, which we understand because we have to work with other organisations, has a distinct definition. About 12,000 of our staff, mainly the front-facing ones, have gone through that. However, I think sometimes when the Committee refers to safeguarding it also means vulnerability.
Rushanara Ali: No, I am talking about safeguarding. We will come on to vulnerability.
Neil Couling: Okay, so safeguarding—identifying that somebody is at risk, and then needs the action of an external entity—that is voluntary at the moment. It is not in the health professional space; it is a mandatory requirement. For our staff, it is about identifying that there are these needs and referring them on to experts and professionals who can deal with that.
Q52 Rushanara Ali: With the greatest of respect, there is a question about whether it should be mandatory. The question about the case I gave you—and there are many others like that—
Neil Couling: Well—
Rushanara Ali: Sorry, can I finish? With the case I mentioned earlier, I am not confident about the safeguarding and the people dealing with that case, and there will be others like that. It is not clear, but if we can be sure that people have the appropriate training, perhaps some of these issues will not come up. I am particularly concerned about these critical cases and the need for ensuring safeguarding training, so that we can be confident that the people in our Jobcentre Plus institutions, who are serving our constituents, are trained and capable on safeguarding. It is not a hit and miss issue where you might get someone in front of you who is trained and doing a very good job or someone else who, through no fault of their own, is not trained because it is not mandatory, so is not as well trained or equipped to serve the constituent.
Sir Stephen Timms: Let me just make a point on this. Safeguarding is making sure that we spot whether somebody is at risk of harm, abuse or neglect. As Neil said, about 12,000 people have been through that training. I think it was 300 at the start of this process and it is now 12,000. The number is going up by 1,200 per month. There may be a point at which we should make it mandatory, but for now we are concentrating on getting the training out and getting a large number of people through it. We will see how we get on. There may need to be a change. Wider vulnerability awareness, which may have been what was needed in the case of your constituent, I do not know—
Rushanara Ali: They have asked for a safeguarding review, so it is clearly more than vulnerability.
Sir Stephen Timms: Right.
Rushanara Ali: I am giving that as an example. We should not fixate on that particular example. The point is broader, which is about people who require safeguarding and the need for training.
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes. Well, there is a big job to be done, but Clare—
Clare Talbot: This is our first year of our multiyear plan. Its focus is really on having a strategic approach. As the Minister said, we are publishing our framework at the end of the year. We are also building on capability and awareness, and we are trying to drive culture change here. Therefore, we want this to be meaningful. We do not want this to be a tick box, “I have done this lead learning—let me move on.” We want it to really resonate with people.
Alongside rolling out our training, we are doing regular sessions. We have lunch and learns. We have experts coming in. We lean heavily on Gail and her safeguarding lead to support us on those cases. ACSSLs run awareness sessions with real cases. This is more than just about one-off training; this is about building that capability.
As the Minister said, we are looking at and considering roles and responsibilities and different training needs, and how we tailor that and roll that out. This is the first year. It is focusing on getting the Department talking about and recognising safeguarding and feeling comfortable with that.
Q53 Rushanara Ali: Thank you. My final question is about the Government stating in their response to our report that they would consider publishing a definition of vulnerability as part of their safeguarding review. Has that been done? If not, is there a reason?
Sir Stephen Timms: There was a definition in the Government’s response to the Committee, and we set out there what we understand vulnerability to mean. I think it is fair to say, though, that we are cautious about publishing a fixed definition of vulnerability because it is quite a fluid concept. Quite often somebody will be vulnerable at one stage and then a bit later they are not, or they will be fine at one stage and then maybe a few weeks later they are vulnerable. I do not think that vulnerability is a fixed concept, and the Department has to be quite agile in spotting whether a particular person is vulnerable at a particular time.
We have set out what we understand the term to mean, and I hope the Committee is comfortable with what we have said. I would not want to overstate the significance that the Department is attaching to the definition, because it is quite a fluid concept.
Q54 Lee Barron: We understand that the DWP undertook a Department-wide safeguarding survey. What did you learn from that exercise?
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes, we did. It was a useful and informative exercise. Actually, the trade union PCS also conducted a survey, which was useful. So 95% of people responding to our survey recognised the importance of safeguarding, 87% said they felt confident identifying safeguarding concerns, 70% said they understood how to escalate safeguarding concerns, and 57% said they understood how to document safeguarding concerns. The survey identified a 38 percentage point gap between recognising the importance of safeguarding—that was the 95%—and understanding documentation processes. I think that has indicated some of the work that we need to do. Then the PCS survey, which was in 2024, indicated mixed safeguarding knowledge among PCS members. Both of those surveys have informed the development of our strategy.
Q55 Lee Barron: Will they be published? Have the results of the surveys been published?
Sir Stephen Timms: I do not think we have published the survey results, no, but that is the top line from it.
Q56 Lee Barron: Is surveying the staff about safeguarding ongoing?
Dr Allsopp: Yes. My safeguarding lead has just done a survey of all our healthcare professionals, for example, in the last month. I do not have the outcome of that because it is still being analysed. This isn’t just a one-off and I know we are planning to do others.
Clare Talbot: This year was a baseline as part of our gap analysis. As we go through our multiyear plan, we will be running it again so that we can understand how we have improved.
Q57 Lee Barron: You are just getting a measure basically of the progress that is being made. Is the level one safeguarding training that the Department offers all DWP staff generic civil service training or DWP-specific?
Sir Stephen Timms: It is civil service training. I have done it. It is quite an interesting programme and it is offered across the civil service. That is the one that just over 12,000 people have now done in the DWP, with about 1,200 new people every month.
Q58 Chair: Thank you. Can I pick up on what Lee was asking you about the surveys? Is there any reason they are not published? Again, this goes back to some of the issues that were mentioned in the first session and the lack of transparency of the Department.
Sir Stephen Timms: I suppose that by reading out the headlines, in a sense, I am publishing it.
Chair: I am sure there is a lot more than that, Stephen.
Sir Stephen Timms: The useful information from the survey I think is the information that I set out, but if the Committee would like us to present more detail, or if there are particular points that you would like us to tell you about, we will be very happy to do so. I completely agree with you, by the way, about the importance of transparency in this whole exercise. I think that is absolutely vital.
Q59 Chair: It would be very helpful if we could have a comprehensive breakdown of the key themes in the survey and the results from that. Thank you.
Sir Stephen Timms: We will see what we can provide.
Chair: Thank you. That is very good of you. I am now going to hand over to Steve Darling.
Q60 Steve Darling: Thank you so much for coming today. We have heard about how there is ongoing training going on throughout the Department like a steamroller. How are you measuring the impact and effectiveness of this training? I am particularly interested in domestic abuse and a trauma-informed approach. What evidence can you give the Committee of the impact—as Ofsted would say, the “so what?”? You are doing all this training. What difference is it actually making and what evidence can you share with the Committee of that?
Sir Stephen Timms: One place to look for evidence is that survey and the successive runs of it so we can see how things have changed. Clare, let me ask you to set out more fully how we are expecting to measure our progress.
Clare Talbot: As part of our multiyear plan on safeguarding, we will be evaluating and assessing as we are going along. At the end of year one, we will be providing an assessment. That is not just about reviewing our own operational data; it is about getting external partners and external experts—leaning heavily on the safeguarding expertise we have in the Department—to help us assess the progress that we have made. It is looking at the end to end of what we are delivering on safeguarding. Building an incremental approach, particularly on training, is one aspect of that awareness and capability building. As Gail mentioned, it is also about the quality of our referrals and getting that feedback from our external partners.
Q61 Steve Darling: I am failing to hear any tangible examples of what you would be looking for.
Dr Allsopp: Shall I give you an example?
Steve Darling: Yes.
Dr Allsopp: Like I say, we are a couple of years ahead in the clinical and health assessment space. Not only do we look at our safeguarding referrals but we look at the learning from those. We are bringing those together in what we call a training needs analysis. That then feeds into a feedback loop and influences the training that we do the following year for our healthcare assessors. That loop then continues, so it is a continuous improvement process.
As you start to teach, you see certain referrals reducing and certain referrals increasing because you are making people more aware of what is happening in the safeguarding space. Over time, as people learn more, you will pick up more. I anticipate that we will see an absolute increase in referrals and an increase in things like IPRs the more that we talk about it and the more that we teach.
Indeed, certainly in the health space, that is what we are seeing at the moment. The more we are talking about it, and training and looking at the training needs analysis, we are seeing the quality improve. The numbers are heightened, engagement is improving and people are talking about it more and engaging much more.
Q62 Steve Darling: I hear what you are saying, but that feels a bit two dimensional to me. I really want to understand how you are doing it. I have not heard about any quality assurance testing—that is a key thing that says, “Bingo, we have hit a mark there.” I have not heard the word—or sorry, the phrase—professional curiosity. In training, you can go through a training programme, and you can be aware and you can signpost. The next level is, you can go through training, and you will be able to engage with people in a meaningful manner. Then the third level, which is a lot more meaningful for me, which is around domestic abuse and having a trauma-informed approach, is having professional curiosity and asking the questions that will turn over rocks and explain some of the trauma-informed challenges that people face. None of the evidence that you have given has given me that evidence of culture change that we need to see within the Department. Prove me how I am wrong, please.
Sir Stephen Timms: Steve, I think you are right. We do not have the evidence yet. We are at the beginning-ish. We will be publishing our assessment at the end of this year. It is a five-year programme. I think those things you are asking for are in the processes that Clare has been describing, and I certainly expect those to be part of the work as it unfolds. I do not know, Clare, whether you can say any more about that.
Q63 Steve Darling: What would give me happiness is if you said, “We are doing so much dip sampling of cases to actually look into that.” How much dip sampling do you do of cases to see evidence of the impact of the training?
Dr Allsopp: In my space, we are doing that all the time. We have a monthly reporting of the—
Steve Darling: That is yours, but it is about the rest of the Department; you have already said that you are ahead. How much dip sampling happens elsewhere?
Neil Couling: One of the things we have done is at the safeguarding adults boards, we were getting rejections of our referrals. We have taken that back to understand why our referrals basically are not of a quality. They do not have the information that the safeguarding adults boards need to conduct a proper safeguarding review, so we were getting rejections on those. Obviously we do not want those rejections.
As Dr Allsopp said, in the clinical area they count how many safeguarding reviews we are making into the safeguarding adults boards. We are not counting those yet in the operational piece of the business. We will be counting those. That will give us some metrics to work off to understand the quality questions you are rightly asking.
Q64 Steve Darling: Lovely. I have a constituency case that I have already dropped you a line on. It is the closure of Cotswold House, which is seeing 130 jobs being lost in the constituency that I represent. It is not really for today to quiz you on that—and I am having a meeting with the appropriate Minister on my concerns around that—but it does support some of the most vulnerable people in the country.
There is a service called the migration gather proforma 1 service, which is as clear as mud, I am sure. That is in respect of housing benefits and where there have been issues around housing benefits for individuals there. Then of course there is the Payment Exception Service, which is for claimants who do not have bank accounts and how we support those individuals. These are clearly some of the most vulnerable people within our society. I met with some of the staff there and the 26 staff had over 545 years of experience. A lot of those staff could be made redundant because there are not the opportunities locally to be taken back on in the DWP.
There is real threat to those two services. What assurances can you give me that vulnerable people throughout the United Kingdom are not going to have a hammer blow to the service that they receive from the DWP because of this closure at Cotswold House?
Sir Stephen Timms: First of all, Steve, thank you very much for letting us know your concern about this. I will ask Neil to respond.
Neil Couling: The folk in Torquay are doing a really good job on those two particular areas. The Payment Exception Service is a really good example for people who do not have bank accounts or cannot get bank accounts, so it is how they get their money. This is not the only place in the country that we do some of these services from, but clearly if those people are made redundant at the end of this exercise—this closure—we will need to put arrangements in place if the individuals decide ultimately that they want to exit the organisation, and planning is in action to do that.
It is part of our normal planning. We never really rely on just one site for obvious business continuity reasons. A site may be closed through flooding, fire or something like that. We always try to have a bit of contingency in the system, but we know that we will need to do more when the site closes.
Q65 Steve Darling: Very briefly to build on that, given their experience, I am surprised that working from home or remote is not seen as an option. Exeter is the next area but it is often too far for people. How are you planning to mitigate the loss of that depth of experience?
Neil Couling: I am acutely conscious that for a number of individuals the public transport, the distance and the time to get to Exeter will just be too much. Hopefully not for everybody, but for some it will. We clearly need to plan for skilling up other colleagues across the country to take up this work if it is no longer being done in Torquay, and work is in hand to do that. We clearly cannot leave customers without payments and so forth.
Q66 Chair: Thank you. Can I pick up on the first question that Steve mentioned? One of our recommendations was related to adding particular categories for those who may be considered vulnerable. We recommended adding victims of domestic abuse as a category within the universal credit additional support area. We never had a response to that recommendation, and it links directly back to what Steve was saying. Could you revisit that, please?
Neil Couling: I think we have, but I will double check for you, Chair.
Chair: Thank you. We did not get a response to that recommendation in the Government’s response, as you will be able to see online.
Neil Couling: It is a listing that we have been adding to since we introduced it, but I will double check.
Chair: Thank you. I am grateful.
Q67 John Milne: Returning to the subject of sanctions, you told us earlier that there are lots of alternative sanctions regimes being considered and some of them are being tried out right now. Can you give us an idea of progress on that and also what are the plans? Are these ideas centrally directed? In my own constituency of Horsham, the jobcentre seems to have been working largely on its own initiative on a milder sanctions regime. Is this directional? What timescales are we looking at?
Neil Couling: As we implement the Jobs and Careers Service, one of the things that colleagues are looking at is the approach to sanctions and whether they are always appropriate. There have always been exceptions. In the case of Ms Ali’s constituent, somebody with those kinds of issues should not be under threat of sanctions, for example. That is in our existing policy. As previous witnesses have pointed out to this Committee, it is not always followed through, so naturally you come back to us and say, “How are you going to make sure that there is adherence to your existing policies?” The Jobs and Careers Service, because it expands the number of people who we are looking at and supporting, will need to review whether sanctions are appropriate in certain circumstances or not.
The other thing I will mention when people ask me about sanctions is that a while ago the National Audit Office looked at attendance in jobcentres, and it found that in six months, 1 million appointments were missed. That is 2 million a year. The number of people we sanction is around 5%. I do not think that we are a sanction-happy organisation, but with those kinds of volumes you do need within the system some way of addressing repeated non-compliance. The kind of policy direction we are moving in is looking at repeated non-compliance rather than first offences getting a sanction.
Q68 John Milne: I am still not clear. Is there a defined programme where you are specifically saying, “In this office, you try this. In this office, you try that”?
Neil Couling: In some of the Jobs and Careers Service pathfinders, there are people exploring different approaches. A local manager has always had the ability to flex—which I think you might have picked up in Horsham—according to what is right at this point of the economic cycle, who the customers are who you are seeing at that point, frankly, and what the kinds of behaviours are. It gets around in the locality what you can do and what you do not have to do as well. You will see local adaptations made too.
Q69 John Milne: What kind of metrics would you place on it? In a way, the safeguarding metric is probably the hardest one, because there are other things—obviously there is a purpose to this, which is to get people into work and so on. What metrics are you tracking and is there any way in which you can get a safeguarding metric in there?
Neil Couling: I think the most important thing we have done is on cases. We effectively have a second pair of eyes on the case, so that it is not just the work coach looking at it. Before it is sent off for a sanction decision, a more senior manager will look at the case. That is an attempt to pick up that a vulnerability might have been missed or should have been taken into account. That will not stop something happening at the point of interaction between the work coach and the customer. The work coach may say, “I might need to sanction you here,” and that might trigger anxiety in some individuals as well. So it is a backstop; it is not the answer to the problem. We have to get the work coaches to be aware of the vulnerabilities and that they should not be even threatening sanctions in those sorts of situations.
Q70 John Milne: Would you be looking at that alongside other metrics such as, literally, is it making a difference on getting people into work? By the way, I am in favour of a softer sanctions regime, and I personally believe it could be more effective at doing the actual job. You have to weigh up all the factors.
Neil Couling: It is for the Minister to speak for Government policy, but the approach to the Jobs and Careers Service is definitely thinking about what is appropriate for getting people into work. If you have ever read “Office of Hope”, which is the history of the employment service, you will see there has been a swing across time between stronger sanctions and a more counselling approach.
Q71 John Milne: Is that being tested specifically with, say, exhibit one over here, then exhibit two—different regimes to compare and contrast?
Neil Couling: These are some of the things they are exploring in the Jobs and Careers Service pathfinders, yes.
Q72 John Milne: Thank you. Finally, has the Department considered sanctions as part of its review of universal credit and, if not, why not?
Sir Stephen Timms: We have not looked much at sanctions in the review work itself, no. My briefing tells me that the sanction rate at the moment is 5.2%. That is a fairly stable figure.
Q73 John Milne: Is that stable over years in the past?
Sir Stephen Timms: I think over a period.
Neil Couling: It has been higher; it has been lower. It has oscillated between 3% and 8%. It has been at 5% for a while now.
John Milne: That is slightly surprising. If we are looking at a softer regime, you would have expected it to go down.
Sir Stephen Timms: Let’s see what comes out of the work that is being done in the pathfinders. I would not want to commit to a lesser rate than the current rate. On the whole, I do not get very many complaints about the way the sanctions regime is operating at the moment. As Neil said, we are very focused on supporting people into work, including people who have been out of work for a long time on health grounds, and this is one of the things that needs to be considered in the context of doing the best possible job we can.
Q74 Chair: Thank you very much. Could you forward the report? I don’t think we have seen that. I presume it was an NAO report that went to PAC, was it?
Neil Couling: That was a while ago now, Chair. It is not a recent one, no.
Q75 Chair: Okay. When was that? Was that when the new sanctions regime was introduced in 2012?
Neil Couling: I think it was in 2017, from memory. It is annexe 3, which I should have referred to. I have given evidence on it many times, because it communicates the challenge of running a jobcentre, with 2 million people not turning up for appointments each year across the jobcentre network. What we are focused on today, importantly, is vulnerable customers and making sure they are not caught up in the machinery of all of that to their detriment.
Q76 Chair: It does. That one-off stat gives a misleading impression that there is a lot of malingering, which is unfortunate.
Neil Couling: In that report, the sanctions rate was about 4% in those days. We were sanctioning 4% of 1 million in six months, or 4% of 2 million. To me, that does not suggest we are a sanctions-happy organisation. We were accepting good cause; we understood that people’s lives might be complex and that something may have happened and they could not do it, and so on.
Chair: Indeed, so they themselves—
Neil Couling: I am not accusing them of malingering.
Chair: It comes down to a different definition of people who may have issues.
Neil Couling: Yes, absolutely.
Q77 Liz Twist: I would like to ask some questions about the migration process. First, have all legacy benefits now closed, and have all claimants migrated from ESA and housing benefit to universal credit?
Sir Stephen Timms: There is still a small number of people in receipt of ESA. I will ask Neil to explain a little bit more about the process. This has been a big exercise and, for a number of people, quite a difficult one, moving from ESA to universal credit. I think the Department has gone about this in a very good way, ensuring that the support people have needed has been in place. A great deal of work has been done. At one stage, I was getting weekly reports about how it was going and the extent to which people had managed to move on to UC. It has been done well, but it has certainly been a difficult exercise for quite a few of those involved. Neil, perhaps you can say a bit more about that.
Neil Couling: Yes. As of last week, which is the last time I looked, there were 420 people still to move across from employment and support allowance. That is down from the 880,000 we started with a little over a year ago. That gives you an idea of the public service delivery that has been involved in doing all of that.
Of the 420, there are about 160 who have an active migration notice—they are within the three-month period in which they need to make a claim for universal credit. They are typically cases where we have judged—and I think this is a good example of our safeguarding approach working—they need an appointee or thought that they might need an appointee. Very often, there is no appointee, such as a friend or family member, to do it for them so we have had to wait for the local authority. We have gone to the local authorities and asked them to become corporate appointees on these customers’ behalf.
There are about 260 on top of that 160 who are waiting on the councils to put in place a corporate appointee process for them. We have not issued a migration notice for them because it would clearly be pointless for them. They are waiting on the council to give them three months. It is proceeding well. These cases at the end are quite tricky, as you would expect, but we are determined to finish as well as we started on this.
Q78 Liz Twist: I believe the aspiration was to complete it by the middle of this year, wasn’t it? We have a small number of outstanding candidates.
Neil Couling: Yes, but we are not driven by that. I was the senior responsible owner for 10 years, and I have told this Committee and the Public Accounts Committee that I was not going to be dictated to by the timetable and that we were going to be led by the customers we are serving. To be honest, some people were quite anxious about the move to UC. They had been scared over the years about what they had heard about it. It was not fair to scare them like that, but it happened, and we had to deal with it. There is a group of people who do not want to come to UC, so they hold out until the last moment. One customer took us to court and lost. We spent eight months trying to persuade her, and then in June we did stop her benefits. She claimed the next day. She clearly did not want to move to UC, but she has made the move and is now successfully on universal credit.
It is a big exercise, but it needs to be individualised as well. It has been informed by our experience and what professionals in the stakeholder communities have said. Organisations of and for disabled people have predominantly been worried about the ESA cases. It has gone remarkably well, and a lot better than in a number of hearings in the past at predecessor Committees, where they were predicting absolute mayhem. That has not happened.
I am not saying there have not been mistakes on cases, because there always will be, but people have made the move across to universal credit. Where they have not—and that has had a bit of coverage—there are good reasons for that. They may have repartnered. They may have savings over the limit, which they probably should have told us about before, but we have not pursued that terribly hard with them, or they have left the country and have not told us. We have had some cases where our officers have actually followed up cases—not physically abroad, but they thoroughly checked that the person had moved abroad and was not just failing to answer us. There are good reasons for the few thousand people who have not made it across to UC.
Sir Stephen Timms: To add to that, Neil made the point that we started with 880,000 people on ESA who were sent migration notices and 856,000 of them have made a claim to universal credit, so that is 97%. There are 23,000 who have not claimed. It looks as though, in most of those cases—including people who technically were not eligible for ESA, but were receiving it anyway—that they have not made a claim for universal credit. One of the features of this process, which I have been quite interested in, is that for quite a number of people it has required somebody from the Department to visit them at home to make the universal credit claim, for all sorts of reasons. The home visiting service has done a very good job during this exercise.
Q79 Chair: May I interject for a second? This was one of the issues raised when NAWRA came to see us.
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes, I saw that.
Chair: I absolutely accept that there will always be issues of human error, and that you cannot get a 100% record, but they felt compelled to write to us before they came about their concerns regarding managed migration. I will read what was noted in our minutes, “Lack of support after initial claim, insufficiently supported safeguarding referrals and IT issues affecting transitional protection arrangements”. They also said there are issues regarding TP related to council tax and social care, and that some claimants were receiving unusual and inconsistent overpayment amounts, suggesting a potential IT error. That is for your noting.
Sir Stephen Timms: Yes.
Chair: I would be interested in the numbers where that sort of issue arose. Again, we will never have 100%, but this has been raised through the Welfare Rights Officers’ Group. At the national level, they felt that it was significant enough to write to us, and they confirmed that when they came to see us. If you could let us know the number of concerns you have had—in the context of the high numbers that you have to deal with, as you say, which I and I am sure all members understand.
Sir Stephen Timms: We can certainly do that. Can I just make the point, Debbie, that I know Neil has met very frequently with organisations like that one and others? I have attended one or two of those calls, and I think the Department has done a very thorough job of listening to all of those concerns and doing everything it can to resolve them, as you said.
Chair: That is helpful to know, Stephen, and I am very grateful. I will hand back to Liz.
Q80 Liz Twist: I want to follow up on my original question about ongoing support to claimants who migrated through the enhanced support journey to universal credit. Is the Department planning to provide any ongoing support for those people?
Neil Couling: One of the things, which picks up a bit on the NAWRA evidence, is they were right to say that for the initial part of the enhanced support journey we supported people to the point of making their claim. However, anyone who knows the detail of universal credit will know, as this Committee will, that you have to get from the claim to the first payment. What was happening in a few important cases was that people were struggling to provide identity and pass the identity checks, or failing to do other things that would complete the claim, so they were not getting paid. In response to that, we introduced what is probably not a very elegant name, but we put a speed bump into the system—I apologise, it is management speak.
On the move to UC cases where people had made a claim but had not completed it, we did not just close the claim as we would do for a normal new claim. We were curious—following Mr Darling’s point—about why that was. We investigated and found out that, in some cases, they had decided not to proceed, perhaps because they had £30,000 in savings that they had not mentioned to us before and therefore they did not want to pursue their claim. In other cases, they simply did not know how to do it and needed help. As the Minister said, I doubled the size of the visiting teams because I knew we would have to, ultimately, go to some people’s homes and help them out. NAWRA was right to say that, but we corrected that problem. I will happily look at any letter they have sent you, Chair, but some of the problems they highlighted were in the past and have been corrected.
I want to reassure the Committee that we do not have software errors in the calculations. That was something we checked and checked. Indeed, I made myself particularly unpopular with one Secretary of State for going so slowly because I wanted to check that all the software worked perfectly. That was years ago now. We do not think we have errors there. We think what is happening is that people are submitting new evidence that causes us to change the calculations. I think that is a good thing if we do that.
Q81 Liz Twist: Okay, so there is ongoing support where it is needed. Some ESA claimants who failed to claim universal credit by the final deadline have subsequently applied for universal credit and found that the LCWRA—the limited capability for work-related activity element—has not been included in their transitional award. According to regulation 21 of the Universal Credit Regulations, how is the Department supporting this group of people?
Neil Couling: If they claim within a month of failing to claim, the transitional protection blanket should throw itself across that as well and allow a continuation of the LCWRA equivalent to the support rate that was in ESA to transpose into the universal credit award. There have been isolated examples of that not happening, which we have corrected and then done the recalculations, which is probably what the NAWRA letter was talking about. I have not seen it, but that is what I assume would have been going on here.
Q82 Liz Twist: Given that it is in the regulations, should the system not have been designed to pick that up?
Neil Couling: There are those two things going on. First, if you claim within a month of the end of your ESA award, you ought to qualify for transitional protection; that is the way the regulations work. That has been happening, and we have been tracking the number of cases that have gone to the end of the migration period and decided to claim in that first month afterwards. If you claim after that, there is no protection in the law. What I was confessing to is that there have been isolated examples where, notwithstanding that, the wrong elements have not carried forward the support rate into the LCWRA, which is what I think NAWRA was talking about.
Q83 Liz Twist: Has the Department issued guidance to work coaches and case managers to make sure that they understand the correct legal position and can support affected claimants appropriately?
Neil Couling: Yes, because it was a mistake that was being made. Unfortunately, the data in the old legacy systems did not allow us to pull it into the new UC system; it was not of the quality we needed. It requires a human to check these things, and humans occasionally make mistakes, but whenever it has been pointed out to us, we have corrected it.
Q84 Liz Twist: Can you give us some idea of the numbers?
Neil Couling: Off the top of my head, I don’t know. I don’t know if we have recorded that, but if we have, I will let you know.
Q85 Damien Egan: Neil, another one for you on the—
Neil Couling: Well, that is not fair.
Damien Egan: We have heard concerns that some councils are treating the transitional element in universal credit as unearned income, meaning that some claimants are being prevented from accessing the council tax reduction scheme. Does the Department intend to introduce any mitigation or guidance to local authorities?
Neil Couling: The council tax system was devolved in 2013, so it is not something we exercise legislative authority over. Councils have responded; I have certainly seen some respond and change their policies on this. I have seen the disability rights organisations be quite active and vocal about this, but it is not something we can fix at our end. We have done the proper calculations. It is a policy choice of the local authorities and it is not something they have been directed to do by Government.
Q86 Damien Egan: Would it be fair to say that the Department would welcome moves by local authorities to put those mitigations in place?
Neil Couling: I am not sure whether, when something is devolved, the Government are meant to say anything, but I will turn to the Minister for a statement of the Government’s policy.
Sir Stephen Timms: I have certainly been pleased when I have heard that those changes have been made, but it is a matter for councils. That is how the system was set up in 2013. Whether it was a good idea to exclude council tax from universal credit in those days is a matter we can debate, but it is now for councils to decide.
Q87 Damien Egan: Moving on to the Timms review, we had the interim report in the summer. The headline finding around PIP was the overwhelming negative feelings of respondents who had been through the process, with over 90% expressing negative views and saying that the system often fails to reliably distinguish between different levels and types of need and the support required. What evidence can you point to that shows safeguarding will be an integral part of the approach to the reform of PIP?
Sir Stephen Timms: As you say, we have published our interim report, the results of which were largely drawn from the call for evidence responses. We had 38,000 responses to our call for evidence, and the themes you have picked out were very strongly represented in the replies we received. We are now starting to draw up the recommendations for our final report, which is due in November. We have a steering group, of which I am one of three co-chairs. There are 12 members of the steering group, and of those 12, all but one are disabled people. Between us, we will come up with a set of recommendations for the future of PIP. The wellbeing of people claiming PIP will be a central concern of the group doing that work, and that is fully represented in the regular all-day meetings we are having at the moment.
Q88 Damien Egan: We have discussed co-production elements here before. A huge number of written responses came in, and you also have the follow-up workshops around the country. I imagine you must have many people who wanted to be part of those workshops. Can you talk to us about how people were selected to take part and how you make sure you have a broad group that reflects the different types of people who may be claiming PIP?
Sir Stephen Timms: In the 38,000 responses to the call for evidence, there was a wide-ranging set of respondents. We followed that up with in the order of 130 workshops in a box. We invited any organisation that wanted to host one to do so, with the materials freely provided, as we were keen for some organisations representing people who would not naturally have completed a call for evidence response to be able to take part in those workshops. It is encouraging that the indications so far have been that we have been able to broaden the set of people responding as a result.
We now have a series of what we are calling shaping recommendations workshops, which will be running for a month from the middle of September. We have invited a number of disability organisations to host those workshops and have issued an open invitation to people who would like to take part. We have had something like 3,000 people saying they would like to participate, and we will be choosing around 300 of those to fill the workshops we are running. Making sure we have a broad representation will be an important consideration in deciding who is invited to take part.
Q89 Liz Twist: I would like to ask about internal process reviews. You told us previously that the Department was considering sharing IPRs with family members on request, case by case. Could you let us know what your current thinking is?
Sir Stephen Timms: I have had that request specifically from Joy Dove, the mother of Jodey Whiting. It is a request we are considering very carefully. Internal process reviews often contain sensitive information, and the Department has to be careful about what it does with that information and to whom it provides it. However, there is a compelling case where, in this instance, it is Jodey’s mother who asked, and we are thinking hard about that. We have not yet reached a final decision, but I am hoping we soon will.
Q90 Liz Twist: Could you give us any idea of the kind of things you are weighing up in making that decision?
Sir Stephen Timms: It is more a question of precedent. We have to be careful that we are not doing something that, in a future case, might cause significant harm, embarrassment or difficulty. We are weighing up all of that and I am hoping we will be able to make a decision quite quickly.
Q91 John Milne: On the subject of internal process reviews, the number of referrals made and accepted in 2025-26 was considerably higher than the number in 2024-25. Can you give us some idea of why there was such a huge jump?
Sir Stephen Timms: I think it is part of the impact of the work we have been discussing this morning, which has raised the profile and importance of these concerns. I have a figure of 166 internal process reviews, 71 of which arose from external review activity—for example, where the Department was asked to participate in an external review, like a safeguarding adults review—while others were prompted internally. The fact that there are more internal process reviews does not mean the Department is doing more harm; indeed, I think it means the reverse. The Department is becoming much more aware of the importance of these matters and the importance of identifying opportunities to improve things, which we are keen to take advantage of.
Q92 John Milne: As you say, this is a reporting issue. Sometimes it can be confusing because it can make things look worse, but you are saying it is a sign of better reporting. Do you anticipate that the numbers will continue to increase over the next few years as that culture of high-level reporting continues?
Sir Stephen Timms: I don’t know. I would be interested to know whether Clare thinks it will continue to increase.
Neil Couling: I do, for what it is worth. I think if we are successful in achieving cultural change—we are not there yet—you will find people more confident to request one of these reviews. They are not about finding fault or causality; they are about learning and trying to understand whether there is anything we could have done differently: “This is a dreadful case that has happened. Should we have made a safeguarding referral to one of the safeguarding adults boards?”—questions like that. As we ingrain the cultural change that the Committee is looking for—and as Mr Darling said, we have a long way to go yet—I would expect the number to rise, and I do not think you should be alarmed if it does. If more cases were coming through the coroners, that might point to something more systemic, but here it might be a sign of cultural change. I don’t know, but that is my assumption.
Sir Stephen Timms: I will make one important point. We are starting to publish the learning from these reviews systematically. We started that in July last year, and so far we have published the internal process reviews from 2021 to 2023-24, and we will bring those up to date when we can. We think it is right that people should see what we are learning from these cases, so that everyone can understand the journey we are on.
Q93 John Milne: Do you think that this could be a useful metric in assessing how far the Department is progressing with safeguarding issues, in the absolute numbers and in seeing whether the same problems are repeating themselves? If you are publishing reports and we see the same issues recurring, that in itself is a metric.
Sir Stephen Timms: I think the internal process reviews are a very useful way of understanding what is going on. I am not sure it is a metric so much. If the number goes up, does that mean we are doing more harm, or simply that we are identifying more? The significance of the number is not clear to me, but they are very useful documents, and the material we are going to publish will be useful and interesting as well.
Q94 Liz Twist: It is back to me now. On the same thing, the Committee’s report recommended that the DWP devise a way to record more systematically cases of serious harm where the individual affected was in receipt of benefits. We touched on this at the start of the meeting. The Government said in their response that a review was under way to strengthen the CMA’s role in the process and that the DWP would explore how it engaged with coroners. Could you update us on progress with that, please?
Sir Stephen Timms: Let me ask the CMA to comment.
Dr Allsopp: Specifically about the IPRs to start with, my team and I undertook a thorough review. We looked at all the IPR cases over a six‑month period to see what involvement the clinical team had and how we had worked across the organisation rather than in silos. Following that review, we have now put in place a new process that Clare will be overseeing, which is the multidisciplinary team triage that I was talking about at the beginning, to ensure we are working collaboratively across the organisation and getting the best out of this learning. We have also developed robust learning loops so that once we learn from the IPRs, we feed that back to our providers.
All of this also comes to our clinical governance board, which is chaired by a non-executive director and has an external member as well, so that we have scrutiny and can take cases to our serious case panel. I am confident about the robustness of the IPR process. Clare will probably agree that we have put in some good measures to improve that process and learning. It is early days, and we have to see how it goes, but it will be strengthened as we go.
On the coroners, I will hand over to Clare. Since I came into post, we have strengthened our responses to coroners by strengthening seniority looking at those. I co-sign those off. I am very much about multidisciplinary working, as you can probably tell, and we have set up another group to look at everything coming in from coroners. As Neil touched on, it is not just about prevention of future deaths reports; it is whenever there is a query or a question from a coroner regarding an inquest. Some of those are requests for information, some are to show what has happened, and others relate to a prevention of future deaths report. We also give evidence at coroners courts, and we have now formalised templates for our responses, rather than them being ad hoc. That is the process. Do you want to add anything about the interactions?
Clare Talbot: Gail has completely stolen my thunder. We are looking at this and we have enhanced our engagement with coroners. We have enhanced our central process so that we are actively learning from what coroners are saying in their conclusions, as well as when they issue a prevention of future deaths report.
Q95 Liz Twist: We talked at the start about a proactive approach versus a responsive approach. Do you have any thoughts on how links with the coronial system can be improved to make sure that more issues are picked up without you having to look at every single coronial report?
Sir Stephen Timms: Is there more we could do?
Dr Allsopp: I think there is always more we can do, and I am sure there is as part of your process, Clare, of taking on responsibility for the coroners. We have not proactively reached out to the coroners recently to say, “Can we have a meeting and talk about it?” We have in the past, but not recently.
Clare Talbot: I have taken this on more recently, in the last couple of months, and that is certainly something that I want to do. I want to build on what the team has done in terms of our relationship with coroners, but also understand how we can work more closely together with them, while ensuring we work within our departmental boundaries and do not overstep our responsibilities.
Q96 Liz Twist: Is that something you are actively looking at at the moment?
Dr Allsopp: Yes.
Clare Talbot: It will be, yes.
Q97 Steve Darling: I would like to welcome what we have heard today about the internal process reviews. If feels as if there is a good sense of direction from that. There is probably a Goldilocks situation—where the numbers you are reviewing are not too hot and not too cold—where you get qualitative information that you are then able to loop around.
Going back to carer’s allowance and the challenges around that, earlier this year we had Liz Sayce reflecting to us that she felt there was a culture within the Department where it was almost as if staff had not done anything wrong and they were told that it was okay and so forth. Hopefully, life has moved on from there. What assurances can you give us about how you have taken account of the concerns raised by Liz Sayce to drive a more positive culture of learning that you have not already shared with us?
Sir Stephen Timms: In response to Liz Sayce’s review—and I think she did a superb job—as you know, we have set up an arrangement to check many cases of carer’s allowance overpayment. I think we have been through 3,000 of them so far, and we are on track to get through all of them in the time we have set out. That is one example of the broader change of culture needed in the Department, which I hope the work we have been discussing this morning will bring about. There are many hardworking people in the DWP, but sometimes things go wrong. Carer’s allowance was an example of that. There have also been tragic deaths that the Committee has rightly highlighted. There have been 13 prevention of future deaths reports since 2014, which is almost one a year. There is a big challenge here, and we think that changing the culture is the right way to set about addressing it.
Q98 Steve Darling: I know from my experience of visiting Torquay jobcentre—other colleagues from the Select Committee will have visited their own—how compassionate, caring and committed to supporting the most vulnerable the vast majority of staff are. Part of this is about driving the culture of change we have alluded to, and having an aviation industry-type approach of sharing when there is a near miss. How are you driving and celebrating that aviation industry-type approach to the culture change that we would all welcome?
Neil Couling: On the specifics of the carer’s allowance issues and the problems with the guidance, the then permanent secretary, Sir Peter Schofield, launched a review of how we were dealing with guidance. It was not up to standard, and you could see how the guidance had got out of kilter with the legislation. We have put in place processes to make sure guidance is updated for legislative changes and also for decisions in the courts and so on. It does come from the top, and the Committee has been right to say this.
As the Minister pointed out, our staff have a part to play and they start with a predisposition to helping their fellow citizens. Indeed, this Committee heard on 4 March what Kirsty McHugh, who is the chief executive of one of the carers’ organisations, had seen when we invited her to Preston to see our work. She said they found a group of staff who were “really dedicated to carers, really understood their circumstances, a lot of picking up the phone and talking to them, and we saw very supportive cultures.” It is not all fixed or all done yet. We have further to go, but we have committed to putting right the errors we made and for which we are responsible.
Q99 Chair: Thank you very much. Is there anything else from anyone?
Sir Stephen Timms: Can I thank the Committee very much for its interest in this area? We are making a big change, and it is to a large extent because of the work and focus of this Committee on this area. I want to thank you, Chair, and the members of the Committee for maintaining that focus. I hope we will do a good job.
Neil Couling: If you would indulge me, Chair, may I add one thing? This is probably Dr Allsopp’s last hearing as our chief medical adviser. Gail has done a superb job over the last few years, and the progress we have made as a Department is down to many of her individual efforts. I want to say a very public thank you for her work. She is someone who gets things done and who I really enjoy working with, and she has done a super job for us. Thank you, Gail.
Sir Stephen Timms: Let me, on behalf of the Ministers, endorse that, and say also that Gail has been a delight to work with over this period.
Chair: It is clear from the evidence you have provided that we are moving in the right direction, although there is still a lot to do. Neil, I will pick up on the point you made about leadership, which applies not just to ministerial teams but to officials, as I am sure everyone here agrees. Gail, I wish you every success in what you do. As I said at the beginning, I acknowledge all the work that you have done. It is not an easy position, but I recognise that and thank you for everything you have done. That concludes our evidence session for this morning.